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A speech at the Man Booker Prize ceremony by prize chair and academic Hermione Lee summed up the recurring threads in 2006 British fiction: “A sense of exile, displacement and alienation was a powerful theme in many of these books … children’s vulnerability, women in repressive communities, old age, and institutions. We came across many characters looking for a secret past, of a family or a country, searching for a lost parent or uncovering a hidden trauma. We found a lot of anti-American feeling, many allusions to war and terrorism. … If all this sounds rather grim, well, it was a serious year.”

Kiran Desai’s Man Booker Prize-winning novel The Inheritance of Loss contained many of these themes. Set in the 1940s in the Indian Himalayas during a time of Nepalese insurgency, it told the stories of a Cambridge-educated Anglophile judge, his orphaned granddaughter, and the son of his cook, a member of New York’s “shadow class” of illegal immigrants. Described by one critic as “a poet of modern disenchantment,” Desai ruthlessly illustrated the bitter pain of immigration, the lasting demoralization that colonialism inflicted upon India, and her view that globalization is an affront to the less-developed world. First-time novelist Hisham Matar was short-listed for In the Country of Men, a portrait of de facto leader Muammar al-Qaddafi’s 1970s Libya from the half-comprehending perspective of a nine-year-old boy. The Times heralded the book as a movement away from the teen-angst-ridden “maturation” stories of the late 20th century: “In Hisham Matar’s extraordinary first novel [the voice of youth] becomes again what it was in David Copperfield and Jane Eyre, the universal cry of an innocent victim of institutional sadism.”

Critics and booksellers expressed surprise that well-known writers such as David Mitchell, Peter Carey, and Nadime Gordimer failed to make the Man Booker short list. Ion Trewin, administrator of the prize, said, “It seems to be a seismic moment in English literature with the old guard perhaps passing on the baton to new talent.” Desai, at 35, was the youngest woman ever to receive the award. In her acceptance speech, she paid tribute to the influence of her mother, Anita Desai, who had been short-listed for the Man Booker Prize three times.

Zadie Smith also treated issues of class and race in her novel On Beauty (2005), winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction. Part satire of American universities, part postintegration drama, On Beauty featured a white academic, his black hospital-administrator wife, and their three children, each struggling with racial identity in different ways. An urban middle-class academic family was also at the centre of Ali Smith’s The Accidental (2005), winner of the 2005 Whitbread Novel Award. Lighter in tone than many of the year’s novels, The Accidental was appreciated for its beautiful construction and the different styles—each conveying the workings of one of its four principal characters’ minds—in which it was written. A reviewer in The Sunday Times wrote, “Smith has written a proper novel with a beginning, a middle and an end, but turned it into an exuberantly inventive series of variations.” Family issues again arose in Edward St. Aubyn’s Mother’s Milk, short-listed for the Man Booker, which explored how mothers affect the past, present, and future of their children’s lives.

The serious climate in fiction writing was reflected in stylistic devices; some novelists engaged in experiments with literary form in a purposeful way, but some deviations cost the work popular appeal. M.J. Hyland’s novel Carry Me Down (short-listed for the Man Booker) was written in the claustrophobic voice of its 11-year-old narrator, a needy, affection-starved misfit of a boy living in a tower block in 1970s Ireland. The protagonist’s narrow vision and flat language—a consequence of his lack of opportunity and grim surroundings—were described as “painful” and “utterly believable” but left one reviewer “gasping for air.” Sarah Waters (short-listed for the Man Booker and Orange prizes) exchanged the straightforward first-person thriller style that characterized her earlier “lesbian Victorian romps” for sombre realism in The Night Watch, a novel about World War II and its aftermath. Narrated from the points of view of four characters, The Night Watch told its story backwards, opening with a portrait of its weary, gray, war-damaged characters in the stale year of 1947 and ending in 1941. As one commentator pointed out, although the novel’s listlessness and reverse chronology made it “a struggle for the reader to engage,” this was “part of Waters’s design.”

Given the current tendency among fiction writers to explore the impact of historical and political realities on the lives of individuals, it was perhaps fitting that the winner of the 2006 Samuel Johnson Prize for nonfiction went to 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005) by James Shapiro. In what was deemed “a revolution” in Shakespeare studies, Shapiro challenged the prevailing view that Shakespeare was a universal writer who transcended his age by showing how he was shaped by the events and climate of a very localized world of “plague, conspiracy and invasion.” Matisse: The Master, the second volume of Hilary Spurling’s monumental biography A Life of Henri Matisse (2005)—a work that took 15 years to write—won the 2005 Whitbread Book of the Year Award. Children’s writer Michael Morpurgo, one of the judges, noted that it read like a story and was accessible to readers who knew little about art. Another notable biography was Matt Ridley’s Francis Crick, a colourful portrait of the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA.

High-brow subjects like Matisse and Shakespeare aside, in the buildup to the Christmas scrum, when sales promised to more than triple, bookstores and publishers placed their hopes on celebrity biographies, a genre that had proliferated recently. As Aida Edemariam reported in The Guardian newspaper, Christmas publishing was now “dominated by the celebrity life story.” Suzanne Baboneau, publishing director at Simon & Schuster, noted, “I think there are about 60 celebrity biogs. Two years ago, it was 10 or 15. It used to be that the sort of books that sold at Christmas were carriage-trade books … the solid literary ones.” Best sellers in this vein included film star Rupert Everett’s autobiography Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins and celebrity gardener Alan Titchmarsh’s Nobbut a Lad: A Yorkshire Childhood.

Although some critics proclaimed the end of the popular-science-book boom, the number of such books on the market continued to proliferate. Fewer books, however, tackled “big questions” such as the meaning of life or the mind of God. Topics were now more specific, ranging from Andrew A. Meharg’s Venomous Earth: How Arsenic Caused the World’s Worst Mass Poisoning (2005) to Vivienne Parry’s The Truth About Hormones (2005), which was short-listed for the 2006 Aventis Prize for science writing. Even smaller questions were answered in Does Anything Eat Wasps? (2005), a collection of quirky queries submitted to New Scientist magazine, and its sequel, Why Don’t Penguins’ Feet Freeze?, both edited by Mick O’Hare. Despite a cautious initial print run of 10,000 copies, Does Anything Eat Wasps? sold well over 500,000 copies in the U.K. alone. Commenting on the diverse subjects of the latest science books, a Guardian reviewer remarked, “Never has so much been explained so well.”

Many science books abandoned the new journalism style of recent years—with its fixation on minute detail and dramatic technique—for a straightforward expository approach. This in no way diminished their readability, however. The journalist Nick Ross, chair of the 2006 Aventis Prize, noted, “This stuff is so accessible it is sometimes hard to put down, and the science is so absorbing and surprising it can make fiction seem dull.” The winner of the Aventis Prize was David Bodanis for Electric Universe (2004), a book that explored electricity from the birth of the universe to the “construction of electromagnets powerful enough to raise an ironmonger’s anvil.” Bodanis politicized the prize by donating the £10,000 (about $18,400) he received to the family of government scientist David Kelly, who had committed suicide, apparently after leaking Iraq-war intelligence to a journalist. Bodanis explained: “Science is all about truth. … [Dr. Kelly] was aware of what was really going on and the government lied and tried to feel they could suppress the truth.”

Certainly a quest for truth characterized the book on the Aventis Prize short list that received the most press coverage. This was Jared Diamond’s grimly topical Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive (2005), an exploration of how factors such as climate change, hostile neighbours, and trade influence the fate of societies and civilizations. His most elaborated case was that of Easter Island, where islanders committed “ecocide” by cutting down every tree, a subject that he showed to have analogies to the present day. Many books, however, treated the impending crisis of climate change more directly. According to Michael Bond, opinion editor at the New Scientist, the most important British contribution to the subject was The Last Generation, by British journalist Fred Pearce, touted by booksellers as “the story that scientists are scared to tell us, because they fear they won’t be believed.”

Another prominent theme in nonfiction was international religious tensions. Richard Dawkins invited controversy with The God Delusion, his response to growing religious fundamentalism in the U.S. and the Middle East. Pitched by one publisher as “a hard-hitting, impassioned rebuttal of all religion,” The God Delusion remained atop best-seller lists but was lambasted by Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books. The reviewer and popular academic called Dawkins’s attack on the faulty logic of religion and the suffering it causes as “theologically illiterate” and accused him of treating “religion and fundamentalist religion as one and the same.”

On the surface, children’s fiction in 2006 offered an escape from contemporary problems. Best-seller lists and children’s-book-prize short lists were crammed with stories of witchcraft, boys’ own adventures, and futuristic fantasies, featuring robotic or cloned characters, art thefts, discoveries of mysterious moldering tomes, and child-heroes prevailing against evil villains. A notable debut was Matthew Skelton’s Endymion Spring, about an adolescent, left to his own devices by his academic mother, who discovers in an Oxford library a time-worn volume with a cryptic riddle inside. Meanwhile, best-selling fantasy writer Terry Pratchett added to his legacy with the children’s book Wintersmith, about a trainee witch trapped in winter.

In an apparent move away from gritty realism, The Guardian children’s-book-prize jury were “ ‘determined that this year’s winner would be a real “children’s book,” ’ something they would have enjoyed when they were children which would also appeal to children today.” Its short list included Frances Hardinge’s Fly by Night (2005), “a richly conceived alternative world full of floating coffee houses and illicit printing presses,” and Frank Cottrell Boyce’s Framed (2005), about a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles-obsessed boy who discovers a Renaissance masterpiece in a disused mine. The winner was A Darkling Plain, the final installment in Philip Reeve’s quartet about a boy’s adventures in a postapocalyptic world characterized by movable, rampaging cities and filled with the detritus of the 21st century. Despite Reeve’s blend of fantasy, science fiction, and action-packed adventure, like many best-selling children’s books A Darkling Plain had crossover appeal in the adult-fiction market. Beneath its apparent frivolity lay a satiric commentary upon Thatcherism and social Darwinism.

A new children’s classic was created, thanks to a competition hosted by London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children. The hospital had received royalties from J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan since 1929, but it was due to lose this source of income in 2007 as the book went out of copyright. The competition was for an “official sequel”; half of the royalties would go to the hospital. By many accounts Geraldine McCaughrean, whose synopsis for Peter Pan in Scarlet won the contest over 200 entrants, created a timeless story similar in tone to the Edwardian original and without a hint of pastiche. One reviewer gushed, “Books such as this are as rare as fairy dust.”

Notwithstanding the prevailing vogue for fantasy, some children’s writers engaged with real and challenging subjects. Mal Peet’s Tamar (2005), winner of the CILIP Carnegie Medal for children’s books, echoed the mood of adult novels, with their current emphasis on the long-range impact of historical forces in shaping the lives of individuals. Meanwhile, Siobhan Dowd’s widely short-listed novel A Swift Pure Cry described the plight of a motherless adolescent called Shell, whose God-fearing Irish community fails to protect her from the consequences of an unplanned pregnancy. Based partly on a true story, Dowd’s poetically rendered debut was described by one reviewer as a “plea for tolerance,” but the triumph of Shell’s spirit over adversity also marked it as a song of hope.

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